Alice Fox

Alice’s process-led practice is based on personal engagement with landscape and has sustainability at its heart. Her background in physical geography and nature conservation underpins her practice. Alice works with natural fibres and gathered materials, employing natural dye techniques, print, stitch and weave in different combinations to create surfaces and structures. Found items, their identity often a mystery because of the action of the elements, form the focus of her response to a landscape. Alice takes an experimental approach to these found items: by engaging with the materials that she finds, manipulating them and experimenting, she learns about their properties, boundaries and possibilities. This exploration becomes a collaboration between object and artist.www.alicefox.co.uk

Alice is running a 4 day course at Lund Studios in May...

Jane Bevan

I create sculptures and vessels using found, natural materials, ranging from silver birch bark, hawthorn and sycamore seeds, to feathers and acorn cups which I gather each day. These materials are often trodden on and discarded despite the wealth of colour, pattern and texture they offer.

The assembly techniques used are traditional such as twining, tying, coiling and stitching. The making process itself is painstaking and slow and designs must adapt to the irregularities and tiny imperfections of the materials.

I am passionate about museum collections and take great inspiration from the objects made of natural materials in museums such as The Pitt Rivers, Oxford and the British Museum, London.

Chris Brook

Subject is predominantly landscape driven, and references both topographical and symbolic forms. Never intended as site specific, instead, best described as portraying a reinvented retreat, one which offers solitude, protection, comfort and shelter. To be immersed within a landscape is not only to be aware of a sensory visual, but also to be accepting of, and experience the visceral and elemental qualities which bind the surroundings together. I have attempted to emulate these qualities through a sequence of layering and overpainting, to suggest traces of former occupancy, scraping away surfaces to reveal the partially hidden, and to define the act of permanence through mark making, taking on the form of an intuitive, scored, non-corrective line. Collectively these processes not only present the viewer with a pictorial dialogue, but also offer a starting point to form their own narrative, in the search to find the particular place we all seek to find, from time to time.www.chrisbrook-artworks.co.uk/Would you like you'd like to join us for a one day workshop with Chris? Please do get in touch and we'll see if we can arrange a date, as we're sure it would be a cracking day! :-)

Sarah Bradford

My work is inspired by and is a reflection of my surroundings. We moved to Northumberland from Wales in June 2007 after over thirty years of holidaying there; a week or two annually usually in October. A single week being a tourist cannot reveal the entire picture. We have now experienced entire years with all the nuances of weather, the seasons, the changing face of the agricultural scene and that particular light that is the north east. It has been full of daily surprises and it still does catch my breath. The bleached post-harvest landscape, soft borderland mists, the feminine contours of the coastal plain, the bronzed purple autumn of open moorland, birch woods, estuaries, sand dunes and the ever present Cheviots marking the boundary in the distance, are all referred to in the colours, forms, surfaces, textures and atmosphere of these works. I am absorbed in précising a landscape through painterly equivalents to evoke my sense of place.

Carolyn Genders

The essence of my ceramics is the exploration of the tension between form, brushstroke and colour. The controlled colour interventions create movement and depth and add harmony to the traditional coiling process.

Finished pieces are the result of extensive exploration, sampling, understanding and ownership of a range of matt vitreous slips and burnished terrasigilitta. Surface colour and mark making, integral to the clay body internationally confuse line and shape. Physical lines define shape and create visual tautness that emphasise the unique rhythm of the vessels.

Geoffrey Bradford

I have always been interested in the quiet, anonymous, hidden away aspects of the landscape. Learning to fly has given me a whole new language to explore revealing as it does all the layered traces of human passage, occupation and intervention.

These drawings are made using pastel and graphite on water colour paper. The way the medium is applied is unconventional. They are worked from the memory of the experience rather than from direct observation.